Organizational Inefficiency Quotes

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.

The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

When companies get big, they slow down. They're not as exciting. If you want to get something done, it takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings.

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

There is so much crap [waste] going on over there [the Pentagon], I could run the Navy Department on the cost-of-living increases alone.

For every hour of brains, you will be charged three hours. The other two hours go to management and project management, which is to say they are wasted.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

Beaurocracy destroys initiative.

Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

In the first place, bureaucracies never become efficient; they're never going to get rid of administrative costs; they're never going to reduce them. That's not the purpose of bureaucracies. It's to increase those things.

A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

Looking at U.N. staff and budgetary rules and regulations, one might think some of them were designed to prevent, rather than enable, the effective delivery of our mandates. It benefits no one if it takes nine months to deploy a staff member to the field.

Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?

We have bloated bureaucracies in Corporate America. The root of the problem is the absence of real corporate democracy.

But the Air Force was sort of a bastard child of the Army, much like the Marines with the Navy. Everything had to be done over by the Army after it had already been done by the Air Corps, a mess.